Taboo Bamboo in America

For over twenty years in New England I heard of a fascination with bamboo groves, whose beauty, as a standing forest and also a constantly moving and musical form of life, was promoted through the popularity of Asian films in the 1970s and 1908s, in addition to the American military presence in Southest Asia.  But there was further mystery surrounding this exotic plant.  We heard of its extraordinary vigor - large species can grow up to ninety feet a year - vines can run for miles - as a sensational threat to Nature, which in our minds was the American Landscape, which was a composite of the true American trees, notive to our soils.  And these most revered and popular trees were American hardwoods from temperate zones - oak, elm, pine, beech, birch, willow, and a also cedar in some regions.  The rest were less symbolic, perhaps because they grew regionally: madronas of the Northwest, coconut palms in the South, cottonwoods in the valley deserts and alpine deserts.  Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and other great in the literary canons celebrated what seemed to them to be the emblematic trees, the trees which grew best in our common soil. 
By the 1960s and 1970s the bamboo become familiar as an Asian and Carribbean native.

I remember one traveller to Japan in the 1980s who described the incredible bamboo groves he had explored, how he had watched the giant moso bamboo literally grow before his eyes.  It was such a potentially invasive tree that it was banned from import to the U.S., many travellers said.  It was something of a fetish to try to sneak it into the United States.  I know of one wh succeeded.  He brought it wrapped in a pipe which had been hidden in a shampoo bottle, and he presented it to his father for Christmas, as a father-son guys-only adventure in espionage.  I wasn't really interested in this gimmick because I had not yet discovered, on my own, the mystique of a stand of bamboo.

Until I found one. 
In Maine. 
I found that there are groves as well as legitimate growers, in many regions of the U.S.  Of course it's not banned in the U.S., though imports might be restricted for other reasons than its invasiveness.

There are ninety species of bamboo growing in the U.S. 

It is both native and imported, with records of bamboo growers on U.S. soil dating back to 1840.

So why is bamboo not a staple of the forestry industry in the United States?
     

The Bamboo Muse

Welcome to the blog. 

We have to start with a history of bamboo groves in the U.S. and also the campaign of suppression which transformed this promising industry into xenophobic cautionary tale.  It is a fascinating story about the past and the future of forestry and national character, the intersection of dreams, greed, paranoia, and innovation.  It’s about the invention of America out of the ingredients of hope, pride and ignorance.  It's about the environmental movement and its adherence to a mythic New England aesthetics, in which natural woodland were seen to have a kind of species purity much like communities sometimes are ethnically homogenous, in which temperate deciduous hardwoods earned the names "American Elm," and "Canadian Maple," while hollow core bamboo, which is fifty times stronger than oak, was devalued and even believed to be nonexistent outside Asia.   

These are lofty introductory comments, I know, I know.  The story of the bamboo revolution is also about beauty in nature, the beauty of forests, the beauty of wood, of bamboo, and a great secret fight which took place over one hundred years ago, when timber companies were allowed to decide just what kind of trees were American, and which were the other kind, undesirable and unwelcome on American soil.  Environmentalists, ecological purists, and eco-farming have not even begun discussion forums on the promise of bamboo, which could save many economies, as well as the environment, keep communities in Tsunami prone locations safe and also financially afloat, protect the atmosphere, lower carbon emmissions, lessen environmental allergies in humans, and even protect migrating bird populations.  So that's it for now.   

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BambooMuse